edit... for all the idiots, name one piece of tech that hasnt been hacked repeatedly... i stand by my statement, glad to see the lot of you love to put your lives and thw lives of others into an relatively untested and very ill secure pile of speeding garbage... imma laugh when the ransomware shows up and kills you because you didnt send em a wire transfer...

Not that I believe it will happen in the next decades but it would be sad if no car could be driven manually in the future. Restrict humans driving during peak times but don't take it entirely away. *crosses fingers*

I doubt the speed with which autonomous cars will reach level 5 that some of the most enthusiastic supporters of self driving technology seem to argue will happen.

That said, this technology is moving forward at a rapid pace. Waymo and GM seem to be moving forward with fully autonomous cars that can, at least in a geofenced area, work entirely autonomously.

I am excited for what fully autonomous driving will mean for my future. I am also terrified what this kind of a future means for employment in general (not just drivers as much of the AI will also start filtering into many many other jobs that require high level decision making from machines).

No technology is pure good or pure evil. We will have to be careful to try to reap as many rewards as we can while trying to mitigate as much damage as we can.

Not that I believe it will happen in the next decades but it would be sad if no car could be driven manually in the future. Restrict humans driving during peak times but don't take it entirely away. *crosses fingers*

People who buy EVs tend to not want an ICE vehicle again, I think when people experience autonomous driving the situation will be the same.

It isn't as though they are planning to ditch controls in all their test vehicles. It is specifically the autonomous test vehicles, presumably the sort of autonomous vehicles to be used like a taxi. It is not surprising they don't want passengers in such a vehicle using direct driver controls.

Not that I believe it will happen in the next decades but it would be sad if no car could be driven manually in the future. Restrict humans driving during peak times but don't take it entirely away. *crosses fingers*

I think it'll be sad if we allow humans to continue manually driving after every car in production has superior self-driving capability. I'd rather live in a world where I don't have to worry about other careless drivers (drunk or otherwise) killing or injuring my family and I.

It's a minor trade off and one I'm sure most will end up being glad they took, especially since it'll save money not having to buy car insurance, much lower fuel cost, ..perhaps even a sizable cut to medical/life insurance bill.

Manual driving could potentially be relegated to a new breed of "driving resorts" -- Wealthy individuals could rent out cars for customers to drive around their private roads in a scenic area ..and there's always advanced V.R. simulations

Not that I believe it will happen in the next decades but it would be sad if no car could be driven manually in the future. Restrict humans driving during peak times but don't take it entirely away. *crosses fingers*

People who buy EVs tend to not want an ICE vehicle again, I think when people experience autonomous driving the situation will be the same.

Agree. I think most people have absolutely no interest in driving. That's why they are distracted so easily. I think the average person would have absolutely no problem letting someone else do the work for them, in this case an automated car, so they can read, sleep, text, etc.

Autonomous cars are a piss-poor replacement for a good network of railways.

Manufacturers can push this autonomous car crap all they want, but it doesn't mean I'm going to give up my existing, non-autonomous car.

I will never be convinced of the safety of autonomous cars, because they're still stupid cars. You can't prevent collisions in autonomous cars if you can't control the flow of traffic, and every car, autonomous or not, is still at the mercy of inclement weather and other vehicles on the road.

This is all bullshit designed to impede progress into building a proper rail system. When's the last time Congress expanded funding for Amtrak so that they could roll out the much-needed positive train control?

Not that I believe it will happen in the next decades but it would be sad if no car could be driven manually in the future. Restrict humans driving during peak times but don't take it entirely away. *crosses fingers*

I recently got to screw around with a Lexus with a bunch of self-driving capabilities. I think Toyota says it's only level 2? The thing made me a little nervous even just on highway curves but for the long stretches of straightaway on the New Jersey Turnpike it was great. The adaptive cruise control was cool but what was amazing was its ability for me to just put on my turn signal and for the car to figure out for itself when it was safe to change lanes and then actually execute the lane change.

My daily driver is a Fiat 500e that doesn't have a backup camera but does have a backup sensor that pretty reliably flips out when there's someone walking behind the car while I'm trying to back up. So putting those two things together I think I'd be pretty comfortable trusting a self-driving car over a human driver. The main problem with self-driving cars right now is that humans have trouble predicting what they'll do since they drive better than human drivers. But they have practically no reaction time so they make things a LOT safer.

Why don't they just make remote control vehicles, like the US military uses to kill people on the other side of the world? That seems legal enough. Telepresence seems to work well enough for US regulations.

I look forward to many capabilities of self-directed vehicles. It would be nice to tell my car to find parking somewhere free instead of paying $10 to park or $20 to park for an NFL game.

It would also be nice to let the vehicle handle the 4+ hr drives between cities. Letting self-driving vehicles go much faster than human piloted ones on interstates would encourage quicker acceptance.

How the vehicle is powered is completely unimportant.

Testing without GPS working or with GPS providing bad data needs to be mandatory as well. Solar activity can make GPS useless.

No scarier than sitting in the passenger seat with your standard run-of-the-mill human driving.

Until you're rolling down the highway and see this pop up on the head unit...

Mind the curve coming up!

Have you heard of the concept of fail-safe vs fail-deadly? Nobody is saying a computer-driven car won't occasionally fail but when it does it will definitely not be fail-deadly.

Trying to make a system "fail safe" for a vehicle traveling on a winding mountain road that has no guard rails is a challenge (I'm thinking about that time I took a rental SUV up Pike's Peak).

The solution might be multiple redundancy in both hardware (computers) and software. That's the say the space shuttle did it. The "backup" software would have to be just smart enough to safely stop the car without going over a cliff or running into anything (car, pedestrian, animal, etc.). And like the space shuttle's backup software, be written by an independent team so that it won't fail in exactly the same way that the primary software failed.

Not that I believe it will happen in the next decades but it would be sad if no car could be driven manually in the future. Restrict humans driving during peak times but don't take it entirely away. *crosses fingers*

Fuly non drivable cars are 30-50 years away still.

Don't believe me? We are 5-10 Years away from level 5 autonomous cars still. Then there is cost. Right now a waymo car is 150-175 thousand each. That's a 50k for a car and 100-125k for the self driving part. Until the self driving part drops to 10-20k you are not going to get millions of them on the roads.

That is what will take so long. Not proving the tech.,. But building it cheap enough.

Honestly, I'm wondering if it'll be worth owning a car when they're able to drive themselves. My own car spends about 21 1/2 hours a day not being driven. That's time that somebody else could be riding around in it. In paying for my car, I'm paying for 100% exclusive use of it. If that use could be shared, the cost could be split among several people.

Not that I believe it will happen in the next decades but it would be sad if no car could be driven manually in the future. Restrict humans driving during peak times but don't take it entirely away. *crosses fingers*

I am with you on this. I agree that some facilities should have AV only restrictions in the future. However, I will want and even need my manual, as in human driver, car on quite a few occasions. I live in a rural area and I recreate in the mountains a lot. I doubt the ability of an AV to get me up a logging road or access trail. I think this will be a large barrier to AV market penetration in the non-urban western U.S.

Edit: One clarification, I would like to have a car with both autonomous and manual driving options. Most of my driving would be in autonomous mode, but I want the ability to drive the vehicle up a road that is not well defined and not on any maps.

Not that I believe it will happen in the next decades but it would be sad if no car could be driven manually in the future. Restrict humans driving during peak times but don't take it entirely away. *crosses fingers*

Fuly non drivable cars are 30-50 years away still.

Don't believe me? We are 5-10 Years away from level 5 autonomous cars still. Then there is cost. Right now a waymo car is 150-175 thousand each. That's a 50k for a car and 100-125k for the self driving part. Until the self driving part drops to 10-20k you are not going to get millions of them on the roads.

That is what will take so long. Not proving the tech.,. But building it cheap enough.

I'm somewhat willing to believe that Level 5 (steering wheel optional) is imminent but I do think Level 4 (mind off) is really, really close. As I said above, the current problem with self-driving cars is mostly that they drive so well that human drivers can't properly predict what they'll do.

Why don't they just make remote control vehicles, like the US military uses to kill people on the other side of the world? That seems legal enough. Telepresence seems to work well enough for US regulations.

I look forward to many capabilities of self-directed vehicles. It would be nice to tell my car to find parking somewhere free instead of paying $10 to park or $20 to park for an NFL game.

It would also be nice to let the vehicle handle the 4+ hr drives between cities. Letting self-driving vehicles go much faster than human piloted ones on interstates would encourage quicker acceptance.

How the vehicle is powered is completely unimportant.

Testing without GPS working or with GPS providing bad data needs to be mandatory as well. Solar activity can make GPS useless.

There’s a company called Phantom Auto that proposes doing exactly this.

[quote="earlyberd"]I will never be convinced of the safety of autonomous cars, because they're still stupid cars. You can't prevent collisions in autonomous cars if you can't control the flow of traffic, and every car, autonomous or not, is still at the mercy of inclement weather and other vehicles on the road./quote]

Once autonomous cars begin to proliferate & outnumber manual cars, it wouldn't make sense for them NOT to have a regulated standard of communication with each other, so they can coordinate the flow of traffic. It seems the only logical outcome for this technology.

Right now a waymo car is 150-175 thousand each. That's a 50k for a car and 100-125k for the self driving part. Until the self driving part drops to 10-20k you are not going to get millions of them on the roads.

That is what will take so long. Not proving the tech.,. But building it cheap enough.

It won't take nearly that long for the cost to come down. The most expensive components are the computer and the LIDAR. Computer components have a long history of making performance per dollar gains, and will continue to do so. And as for LIDAR, new solid-state devices are hitting the market now, with price tags that are tiny fractions of the old units. Cost is an issue now, but it'll be resolved quickly as autonomy is further developed.

Autonomous cars are a piss-poor replacement for a good network of railways.

Manufacturers can push this autonomous car crap all they want, but it doesn't mean I'm going to give up my existing, non-autonomous car.

I will never be convinced of the safety of autonomous cars, because they're still stupid cars. You can't prevent collisions in autonomous cars if you can't control the flow of traffic, and every car, autonomous or not, is still at the mercy of inclement weather and other vehicles on the road.

This is all bullshit designed to impede progress into building a proper rail system. When's the last time Congress expanded funding for Amtrak so that they could roll out the much-needed positive train control?

Do you really thing rail is a good solution to personal transportation in the U.S? It may work for long point-to-point routes and in dense urban areas (subways) but what about in low density rural areas? In places where the population density is too low, the rail line would never be economically feasible. Take Montana as an example. The state has an area about the same as Germany but with a population of about one million people. There are essentially five or six major cities, each of which is about 1.5 hours or more away from its nearest major neighbor (and that is with 80-mph speed limits). How will rail be able to serve the dozens, and I do mean 24 to 48 people, a day that may travel between those places on a regular basis? The expense of the right-of-way for the rail road alone could never be recouped.

Not that I believe it will happen in the next decades but it would be sad if no car could be driven manually in the future. Restrict humans driving during peak times but don't take it entirely away. *crosses fingers*

People who buy EVs tend to not want an ICE vehicle again, I think when people experience autonomous driving the situation will be the same.

Yeah, I see so many people saying they'd never use an autonomous vehicle. But they'll take a ride in an autonomous cab or with a friend who owns one. And then maybe when the technology isn't too expensive they'll buy one so their kid can take it to soccer practice once in awhile or something, but they'll intend to always drive. Then they'll be out for a night drinking and use it; or on their morning commute when they have to get ready for a presentation, or they need to help their kid do something, or whatever.

Before they know it they'll be using the technology regularly.

Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt their will be a few die hards that will completely resist the technology for as long as possible... I just expect it will be a lot lower than the percentage of people that currently think they'll never buy into it.

Autonomous cars are a piss-poor replacement for a good network of railways.

Manufacturers can push this autonomous car crap all they want, but it doesn't mean I'm going to give up my existing, non-autonomous car.

I will never be convinced of the safety of autonomous cars, because they're still stupid cars. You can't prevent collisions in autonomous cars if you can't control the flow of traffic, and every car, autonomous or not, is still at the mercy of inclement weather and other vehicles on the road.

This is all bullshit designed to impede progress into building a proper rail system. When's the last time Congress expanded funding for Amtrak so that they could roll out the much-needed positive train control?

Rail is great for getting large numbers of people to a limited number of destinations, but it is absolutely a piss-poor solution to getting a large number of small groups of people to a large number of destinations. That's why we need cars.

Right now a waymo car is 150-175 thousand each. That's a 50k for a car and 100-125k for the self driving part. Until the self driving part drops to 10-20k you are not going to get millions of them on the roads.

That is what will take so long. Not proving the tech.,. But building it cheap enough.

It won't take nearly that long for the cost to come down. The most expensive components are the computer and the LIDAR. Computer components have a long history of making performance per dollar gains, and will continue to do so. And as for LIDAR, new solid-state devices are hitting the market now, with price tags that are tiny fractions of the old units. Cost is an issue now, but it'll be resolved quickly as autonomy is further developed.

Also once insurance companies realize what a liability human drivers are it will become very expensive to insure a manually driven vehicle.